sculpture
They wanted a monument
One of the responsibilities for an architect is to provide a space that is usable and enhances the possibilities for what you do. But mostly, museums are just the opposite; they're horrible spaces, anti-art, they can't be used. They can't function, they overwhelm it. So in a way, they become objects in themselves many times, almost sculptures, and they get a lot of aggrandizement out of it...In terms of Bilbao, the one difference there is that they did not really want a museum, they wanted a monument. They wanted a thing that would bring people to the Bilbao.
Trees and graphs
A tree is a kind of graph, but a graph can be considerably more complex than a tree.
I have reason to believe, which for brevity’s sake I will treat elsewhere, that the most complex class of processes and structures we humans can consciously prescribe, reduces mathematically to a tree. A tree has a top, bottom, left and right. Its branches fan out from the trunk and they don’t intersect with one another. They are discrete, contiguous, identifiable objects which persist across time. Trees are Things.
Software and websites, however, reduce to arbitrarily more complex structures: they are graphs. A graph has no meaningful orientation whatsoever. No sequence, no obvious start or end—at least none that we can intuit. It is better considered not as one Thing, but as a federation of Things, like the brain or a fungus network, or perhaps a composite artifact left behind from an ongoing process, like an ant colony or human city.